 My name is Eric Milton, I'm a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, an entomology student, so a lot of this is gonna be focused a bit on insects, but the project that I've been working on and what I'm gonna be talking to you today is about floral plantings and agriculture, how we can use these floral plantings to maximize quality of our protection and also to try to promote pest suppression all at the same time. So as an outline of what I'm gonna be talking about, also very clearly in the back, if you can't hear me, raise your hand, let me know. Also in general, I'd say move up if you can, because it's not very bright, some of the stuff might get hard to see. But as an outline of what I'm gonna be talking about, first we're gonna go into the background about floral plantings, what are they, where do you use them, why do you want them there? This will segue nicely to the benefits these floral plantings can have for growers, what kind of good things we can expect to have if you put these floral plantings in around your crops. Then we'll go into the background of my project, go into what we did, the results that we found, and see how this ended up affecting pollinators and also insect predators. And finally, we'll get you a bit of application for berry growers, how you can utilize this information and utilize our findings, and how these floral plantings can actually be very beneficial for you. Now, as a disclaimer, now that you're all sitting down as you like to leave, my project deals with flowers around potato fields. Originally I was working in berries, my project had to switch a bit, but even though I'm working with flowers around a potato field, these results do apply very nicely to other crops. And that's illustrated by the fact that originally we were going to work in berries. Berries are actually a very good crop to have these floral resources around. So although my results are talking about potato fields, this does relate very well to berries and we will go into a bit of other research that other people have done and tie all that together pretty nicely. But jumping right into it, floral plantings and agriculture. So first off, what are we talking about when we say floral plantings? What is it that we were referring to? Well, usually it's perennial wildflower plantings that are planted around the edges of fields. And that gets up the next question of, where is it usually used? It's oftentimes put in the unproductive margins of fields where you normally have just sort of grass or other things growing unmanaged land. Sometimes it's actually sown within the field itself. You have strips of wildflowers intercrop with everything else. That's a bit less common. What we're going to be talking about is when it's actually in the margins of fields. If you look in the background of this slide, you can see that behind that yellow sign and around that yellow sign, there's this wildflower planting they have there, which is underneath power lines and between the road on the left and the crops on the right. So again, generally unused land that you can then have this wildflower seed mixture planted there. And what do you hope to accomplish when you put these floral plantings in? Well, first and foremost, you want there to be a stable source of flowers throughout the year. And this source of flowers can attract beneficial organisms and this will then provide benefits to the grower in the form of what we call ecosystem services. And for those of you who haven't heard the term ecosystem services, I'll be using it a lot. And what that is, it's a very broad term and includes quite a few different things. But for the most part, it can be defined as an ecosystem service if it is a value that is provided by the environment to humans. And usually minimal or no input is required from us humans in order to get this benefit after initial sort of establishments, period. And so usually this results in higher yields, but it can also lead to reduced costs by reducing the inputs. You don't have to use as many pesticides. You don't have to bring in managed honey bees to pollinate, things like that. But it also can include other novel benefits or even novel sources of revenue. And to get at what some of these ecosystem services are, this might be kind of hard for you guys to read, but there's a whole list of them all right here. This is not all of them. This is just quite a few that there are. There's things like weed suppression, biological control, which is predation of pests. There's things like conservation, erosion control, ecotourism, that's one of those novel sources of revenue we're talking about. Things like aesthetics, it just looks prettier. And then also things like water retention and increasing the amount of carbon present in the soil. And this figure also shows a very neat thing, which is sort of the stack of services right here. And this gets the idea of stack ecosystem services. If you put in floral plantings, you probably won't just get one of these benefits. You'll instead get multiple benefits from it. So with floral plantings, what do we hope to accomplish? Well, if they do indeed provide flowers throughout the season, first and foremost, we would hope that this will help us to conserve beneficial organisms. These flowers are present. They're not something that's normally there in an agro-ecosystem. So more insects or more other beneficial organisms will come and be attracted to that. Beneficial organisms could be pollinators, all kinds of different bees that can then pollinate your crops. It could be predators that can move in there or it could be you want to preserve more charismatic species, say like monarch butterflies or something like that. Those would all fall into the category of beneficial organisms. And then if you do attract something like pollinators, you would then hope that they are attracted to the flowers. They move into the adjacent crops and you get some sort of pollination service. If you're working with something like blueberries, that could be very important where you actually need pollination in order to get good free set. And then another similar thing, you could promote the predation of pests. Predators are attracted to a wildflower planting. They then move into the field and they also will eat pests that might be economically damaging. So those are three pretty easy to measure, different ecosystem services that I'm going to talk about, but there's also a couple of more intangible things that can be provided. As you can see here in the background, these are all members of the EPA who are on a farm inspecting a floral planting that has been put in by a grower. And this gets at the idea that an ecosystem service that these plantings can provide is meeting sustainability initiatives or goals of environmental stewardship. These are things that companies often want to do or have to do based on different requirements. And so this is a really good way to do that. You have all these flowers there. And also this looks really good to other people in a lot of scenarios. You get good PR, it can appeal to your consumers. It shows that you do and you care about the environment or having sustainable practices. So both of these are somewhat harder to quantify, but they're both very important because these are two of the primary reasons why a lot of growers actually put these flower plantings in the first place. So right here we have a whole bunch of different benefits that these floral plantings can provide, conserving beneficial organisms, having pollinators present, predators that move into your field and hopefully suppress pests. And then also those two more intangible ecosystem services at the end. And as I said before, we're focusing more on those first three because there's something that I could measure. That's what my project and research is dealing with. But don't forget about those last two because we will talk about them a little bit at the end and they are very important. Now, there are some unknowns related to those ecosystem services. And the biggest ones is that the results often do vary case by case. If you put in these wildflowers, you're almost certainly going to attract more beneficial organisms. But if you do attract more pollinators, do they actually move into your crops? Do they actually provide additional pollination? Or if you attract more predators, do they have an appreciable impact on pests? Again, do they move into your crops? Do they actually eat enough pests so that you might not have to spray? Or you will actually see a benefit from it. And they finally, one of the last things that is oftentimes a bit unknown is how compatible this is with conventional agriculture because usually it's smaller growers who put in these kinds of floral plantings. So my project tries to answer or at least get at the answers for a lot of these different questions. So the background for my project, we are working with Artie Offit, who is, excuse me. Artie Offit, who's a very large producer of potatoes. And they have farms across the country, but they have one very large farm, as you can see here around Park Rapids, which is in North Central Minnesota. And they've got quite a few fields that are also quite large. They're about a kilometer in diameter. And on the edges in these unproductive margins, like we were talking about, they've sown a mixture of flowers there. So where there's normally sort of grass or maybe trees or shrubs, you now have this big patch of flowers growing. And they put these in with the goal of promoting pollinators and trying to conserve pollinators that might not normally be able to survive in this area. And this is a commercial seed mixture that they used, which was created by Shingenta and pheasants forever. And again, this seed mixture, the stated goal is to try to promote pollinators. So with all that in mind, this was a kind of great experimental setup where we could test something in the real world here. And we wanted to see how well these floral plantings actually worked. So first and foremost, we wanted to ask, do the plantings establish well? If somebody wants to put in these flowers, will they actually result in more flowers and a greater number of blooms and a wider range of species? And will they last throughout the season? We also wanted to know, do these floral plantings actually attract pollinators? That's what it's sold as doing. So does it actually work as advertised? Do you get more pollinators attracted to both the margins with flowers and do these pollinators move into the field? And finally, we wanted to get at the idea of stacked ecosystem services and ask, do the floral plantings also improve the predation of pests? That is not a selling point of the seed mixture, but oftentimes as we've seen, you can get these multiple benefits. So those are the three questions that we wanted to try to answer with my research. We'll get right into the results of it, starting with floral cover. And so here on the X-axis, we have our treatment flowers, which will basically always be on the right-hand side here, means that the margin had that wildflower mixture put in and control means that there was no wildflower mixture, it's just an unmanaged margin, usually grass and shrubs. And in this case, on the Y-axis, we have floral cover, which just means basically the number of flowers and the size of it, how much area they took up. As you can see here, the flower bar is quite a bit higher. It is pretty clear in this case that these floral plantings did lead to a greater number of flowers being present. And this seems like kind of an obvious result, but it is actually a very important thing. In some cases when people put in these wildflower plantings, especially if the seed set's not designed very well, that doesn't actually do anything. So it's really important to know that yes, you do get more flowers if you use this particular seed mixture at least. We also didn't just look at floral cover, we looked at floral richness, do you get a wider range of flowers? And again, X-axis is the same, Y-axis is now the number of species. The results are very similar. When you put in this wildflower planting, you get not only a greater number of flowers, but you get a greater variety of species of flowers being there. So to answer that first question, do these floral plantings establish well? Yes, it seems so. They led to more flowers covering more area. They also led to a greater number of species. And these flowers, most importantly, would bloom throughout the season, so they provide that stable source of resources for beneficial organisms. So check, check, and check. That was all good. Fall plantings did indeed establish well. But we're gonna move on to the slightly more interesting topic of pollinators. Did it bring in a greater number of bees and other beneficial organisms that can help to pollinate? Come on, there we go. So, axis is the same again. Now the Y-axis this time is the number of pollinators that we found, on average, each time we went out and sampled. And we found a very similar result to what we found with how well the flowers did in that the flowers did indeed attract a significantly higher number of pollinators. And this, again, is an exciting result. It shows that, yes, more pollinators are being attracted to these flowers, and again, this seems to be working as advertised. But we weren't just interested in the number of pollinators present. We also wanted to know how does the pollinator species richness fair? Are we attracting a more diverse community to this area? And unfortunately here, it doesn't seem like that's the case. The flowers are basically exactly the same. They're not statistically significantly different from each other. And so this is important because we were attracting a greater number of pollinators, but we're not actually conserving a wider range of species. So if that's your goal to use a floral mixture like this, do not just bring in more pollinators, but also to try to conserve, you know, a wider number of species, it's definitely possible that it might not work out so well. At least that's what our results indicate for right now. Now, moving on to pollination. Are you actually getting these pollinators moving into your field and pollinating your crops? Well, we were working in potatoes and we didn't quantify pollination because the potatoes don't need it. We're not planting these potatoes from seed, at least in this case. So we didn't directly quantify pollination, but there was a good proxy for that. And that's just looking at how many pollinators are present in the field. Because if there are pollinators present in the field, we could assume if there were flowers, they might very well be pollinating them. So we wanted to determine if the pollinators move into the crop. And with that in mind, here is what we found. This one's a little bit more complicated, but y-axis, sorry, x-axis on the bottom, we have meters from the margin. So the further to the right we go, the further into the crop we are. Zero meters, in the case we're in the margin itself, y-axis is the number of individuals. And here, the sort of light green is when we had a control margin, the teal is when we had flowers in the margin. And you can see right off the bat that the further we go into the crop, the fewer pollinators we find. There's quite a few pollinators present in the margins, but they don't seem to really be going very far into the crop. Even at the edge, 10 meters in, there's very few pollinators that are actually moving from those margins into the crop. So yeah, few pollinators are going very far into our cropping system. That's not the only thing we were interested in. We also wanted to see are more pollinators being attracted by the flowers. And it's kind of small, but you can see that these teal bars are higher than the green bars there. And we ran the analysis, this was actually significant. So it's true that the flowers did lead to more pollinators being present in the crop, although there's not very many pollinators in general who are going to be there in the first place. So looking at our results for pollinators and for pollination, do the flow of plant-based attract pollinators? Well, yes, it seems so. The flowers did indeed attract more pollinators to the edge of the crop. But they did not increase the number of species present. We didn't get a more diverse community. And so our goal of conservation might not be being met in that case. And there were more pollinators present in the crop when we had the flowers, but it was a very small increase in numbers. There weren't that many to begin with. So if we are actually looking to increase rates of pollination, this might not work out so well. So next, we're going on to the final point that we looked at, which is predation of pests. Are we attracting predators? Are they going into the crop and are they eating different pest organisms? And so we utilized sensinal prey, which in our case was egg masses from Colorado potato beetle, which is the main pest in potatoes. And we put those inside the margins. That's in the flowers themselves or inside the grassy control areas. And the reason we did that was we wanted to test, first of all, are their organisms being attracted to the flowers that will eat insects or eat these pets at all? And then we would also look at inside the crop. But first, we wanted to make sure that this was actually working inside the margins themselves. On the Y axis, we have the number of eggs missing or consumed. X axis is the same as usual. I think this speaks for itself pretty well. This flower bar is a lot bigger than the other one. In the margins that had flowers, predators were coming and they were eating these eggs at a much, much higher rate than in the control margins. So this is an exciting result because it indicates that if you put in these flowers, you are attracting predators and these predators will eat these different pests that might be present. So that's great. That's in the margin though. It's not in the crop where we actually wanted. So we decided to put the eggs in the crop as well and see what we got. And fortunately, this is a very different result. They look like they're different. They're actually not in fact, they look like maybe one egg consumed in general. Almost no effect here. So it seems that the predators might be attracted, well, the predators are being attracted to the flowers. They're showing up. They do want to eat these pest organisms but they're not moving from those margins into the crop itself, which is where we actually want this predation to occur. So do floral plantings improve the predation of pests? Well, they do attract predators. The flowers do indeed attract predators. Those predators will eat more pests inside the margin themselves but the benefit in our case at least does not seem to extend into the crop, which is where of course we actually wanted to be happening. So as an overview of all the different results that we found, first and foremost, the floral plantings did indeed increase floral cover and richness, so that's good. It's performing as advertised. Additionally, it led to increased abundance of pollinators. So again, it's bringing in more pollinators from the surrounding area, which is exactly what we want to see. And it did lead to increased predation of pests in the margin and it clearly was attracting predators. However, there was no change in the pollinator richness, not a more diverse community. Few of those pollinators were actually moving into the potato fields themselves and there was no increase in the rate of predation at the actual edge of the crop. So most of the research that's been done with these floral plantings around berry crops has been done around blueberries. Blueberries require pollination, more so than things like raspberries. And so this is a really good system for people to be studying these floral plantings in. And in general, one of the results they found was that small fields under a hectare in size, so pretty small fields, relied almost exclusively on wild pollinators. So if you have really small fields like this, floral plantings could be especially helpful here. You attract more of these wild pollinators, they come in pollinate, you don't need to bring in other managed beehives. And this is true across the board, even for larger fields, which they'd also studied from this, you can't read it probably, but Balau and Isaacs. They found that wildflowers did indeed increase pollination in the adjacent crops. And in their study, it reduced in some cases completely eliminated the need to bring in honey beehives to help pollinate these blueberry crops. They also looked at if they increased the predation of pests and they found that it actually did. Their results were a little bit more intriguing than ours, but they had something very similar where when they put stuff in the margin of the fields, that's where the most predation was and the predation dropped off pretty precipitously the further into the field you went. So it was a bit better, but it wasn't great still. So predation seems to be less likely to occur from here. But probably the most exciting result they had was they found that these wildflower plantings were found to be economically beneficial after just a couple of years. So this graph shows on the y-axis, well, start with x-axis. The x-axis is the number of years since the wildflower planting has been put in and the y-axis is the cumulative profit in dollars. And we have three different scenarios here. There's one with like a maximum price where berries are selling very well and you get a subsidy from the government for putting in these wildflower plantings. We have the average price of berries with no subsidy and it's sort of a worst case scenario which is where berries are not selling well and you have no subsidy. And you can see all these lines start below zero of the cumulative profit because it costs money to put in these wildflower plantings. And starting first with the sort of best case scenario, maximum price with the subsidy, they found that after three years, you start to turn a cumulative profit. That these wildflower plantings attract enough pollinators where you get increased yields, you don't have to bring in additional de-hives and it saves you enough money that after three years, you start to turn a profit on this. But of course, that's the best case scenario in the slightly more realistic probably and worst case scenarios. After about four to five years, that's when they start to turn a profit. I realize now you cannot see this line at all for the minimum price, but it goes right about here. So after four years, they found even sort of under the worst case scenario, these wildflower plantings would start to pay for themselves. In this case, they were working with a four hectare blueberry field and a pretty large wildflower planting of about half a hectare. So if you have large wildflower plantings and you're working in blueberries like this, it is very possible that you will actually start to see some tangible economic benefits from putting these in. So what can you expect if you do in fact put in one of these wildflower plantings? Well, you're very likely to conserve beneficial organisms. You'll attract pollinators, you'll attract predators, you might attract some of these other charismatic insects. That seems to be pretty certain that that will happen. You're also likely to provide pollination to the crops. We found we attracted a lot more pollinators and combining that with the results that they found in other studies, it seems you will get additional pollination to crops like blueberries. In terms of promoting the predation of pests, that seems less likely. Our results indicated that was unlikely to happen. Other studies have found it a little bit better, but probably not something you should rely on that predators will be attracted to your flowers and that they will move into the adjacent crops. And finally, these last two sort of more intangible ecosystem services or goals. This is something you'd have to decide for yourself if you're growing berries, whether or not this meets your different desires for environmental stewardship or being sustainable. But it does seem large companies are using these floral plantings and this is the primary reason they do it. It's for good PR, it's for meeting all these different goals. And so this definitely seems like, I think a compelling reason, simply on its own to put in these wildflower plantings. And in addition, you will likely conserve beneficial organisms and probably provide additional pollination to your crops. Other people have done, yes? Do you think your results would have been different if you weren't using a potato crop? It's definitely possible because again, the results do vary case by case. And so I will talk about that a little bit. Some people did some research with wildflowers here, but yes, that is a very good point. It will be different. So if you're attracting pests to the trap, let's call your pollinator having a trap crop. Yes. You're attracting beneficial predators to the trap crop. So if we've got insects that move in from the edges of the field, you're killing those insects before they move into your field. When you say insects, you mean pest insects? Pest insects, yes. Yes. So that is definitely possible where it's like if you have all these pests that might be moving in from the edge of the field, you have these flowers there, they bring in predators, they could preemptively kill them before they move into the field. Is that what you're saying? Yes. That is definitely possible. It's a lot harder to actually figure that out. We have been measuring pests. I didn't talk about that in this talk, but we also looked at pests inside the margins of the fields as well. In our case, we didn't find many Colorado potato beetle. They seem to sort of get past that barrier and get into the crops. But it is an important point that these wildflower plantings might sort of preemptively prevent the pests from getting into the field in the first place. Where can I get more information on that seed mixture? So the seed mixture is created by singenta and pheasants forever. And I believe it's called the honey bee and monarch mix. So if you look that up, I'm sure you'll be able to find it. There are other seed mixtures that are also available. It's not like this is the only one, but this seems to be one that large producers have been using or sort of going towards. And this is a native plant primarily? It's a mixture. There's some native plants. There's also some stuff like, there's different clovers, a couple of other annuals, things like that. So it is a mixture between the two, but yes, it's about half and half, I would say. Is there any management you had in the long, the end of the year or something? You can, you don't have to. And there's also some regulations where if you put this in, you're not supposed to mow it between I believe it's like April and October, because you know, if you go through and cut it down then and kill all your flowers, it's not gonna repropagate, things like that. We planted some last year in the established slope. Yes, that is important to note. It takes a couple years before it really sort of comes into its own. And at the start, at least from what we saw here, they don't look that great. They don't look very impressive. And it's just like, what did I spend my money on? But if you wait a little bit, they'll start to look a lot better. And seed cost is not cheap? No, no. So that is one thing that was nice with this particularly large corporation is that they were able to more on a whim say, hey, we're gonna do this on a couple of our fields, which is important. But on the other hand, the previous study done, they found that the costs were offset over time.